"The idea of purgatorium as a place of after-death purification distinct from the finality of the place of the elect and the damned (heaven or hell) that would be determined by God only on Judgment Day was put forward as a learned opinion by leading Western theologians, particularly Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great. These thinkers seemed to wish more than the Easterners to bring some systematic order into the diffuse doctrine of the afterlife and judgment. It was Pope Gregory in the seventh century who elevated the opinion of the earlier thinkers into a more or less formulated doctrine: "Purgatorial fire will cleanse every elect soul before they come into the Last Judgement." So began the divergent thought that developed over the course of centuries between the Byzantines and Latins.

The Eastern Christian world retained a simpler doctrine of the afterlife that maintained that the souls of the elect, even those who were not particularly holy, would be retained in "a place of light, a place of refreshment, a place from which all sorrow and sighing have been banished." This view reflected the statement in Revelation 14:13 that "those who die in the Lord rest from their labors." In short, the state of afterlife as it was envisaged in the Eastern church was generally a happy and restful condition in which the departed souls of the faithful were not divorced from God, but waited on Judgment Day with hopeful anticipation, as the time when they would be admitted to a transfigured and paradisial condition in proximity to God."